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  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    mmmmmm, iops.
  • LB-ID - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    It's still a drive from OCZ, a company that has repeatedly and blatantly used its customer base as unpaid beta testers, and lambasted them when they dared to complain about it. No thank you. The fastest drive in the world is of no use to me if it's causing my computer to BSOD constantly. I'll be spending my money and that of my many clients on drives with proven track records for reliability and excellent customer service, both sadly lacking in OCZ products.
  • hackztor - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Ocz is the only one that actually got to the bottom of the bsod screen on sandforce. In the end it was sandforce fault because they made the controller. All the other companies waited and then used the fix. Intel is the exception who waited a whole year before releasing them to validate but they still use sandforce controllers. Vertex4 is the 1st time that ocz now owns the controller and firmware that goes into the product. I hope this will prove to be better and have quicker fixes. Ocz is always the first to release the technology so expect some issues, but thats what people take for early adopting. I had 5 vertex 1 die on me and then they upgraded me to a vertex2. Just purchased the 4 so hope all goes well.
  • taltamir - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    "Ocz is the only one that actually got to the bottom of the bsod screen on sandforce."

    Actually that was intel.
  • hackztor - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Not true. Ocz pushed sandforce to finally find the issue based on what the users were telling ocz while sandforce kept trying to deny the issue and could not find it in a lab environment. If you see further down I said intel waited a year with validation going on.
  • breakSSD - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    You have no idea about ssd validation if you think Ocz pushed sandforce for BSOD.The fact is that Intel found this and kept sandforce busy with fixing the issue while ocz even though knowing the issue release agility 3. Anyways doesn't matter who takes the credit, people know where to go when it comes to reliability.
  • iceman98343 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link

    you do realize intel 520s are now getting bsods?!
  • Obsoleet - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    You go to Samsung for reliability. Iceman is correct, word is spreading of more 520 stability issues. If you want the fastest, most reliable SSD get the 830 as Anand recommends.
  • Einy0 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    At work we have deployed about 50 - 80GB Intel 320 Series Drives and so far nearly 60 - 64GB Samsung 830 Drives. The Samsung drives are screamers but we've seen a lot of strange issues with the Samsung drives that we never had with the Intel drives. We have not had a single drive from either company fail or come DOA. That amazes me personally, not a single dud. We've literally had dozens of faculty members come ask us what we did to their computer that made it so fast all of a sudden. The issues we've had with the Samsung drives about 1 in 10 causes Windows mini-setup to freeze. We re-image the drive again it works just fine. We are thinking maybe the compatibility with some SATA controllers isn't as robust on the Samsung drives as it is on the Intel drives.
  • gandx - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link

    Or choose a SSD with a marvell controller like the Corsair Performance Pro or Plextor M3P. Both are fast and stable. I would never choose a SSD with sandforce again after using a vertex 3 for a while with lot or problems and i'm obviously not the only one.
  • danwat1234 - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link

    The Vertex 4 does have a Marvell controller, with Indilinx firmware
  • Denithor - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    You seem to have forgotten Octane, 'the 1st time that ocz now owns the controller and firmware that goes into the product.'

    And, as far as I've heard, Intel was the only one to truly fix the BSOD associated with the SandForce controller. Others made improvements and reduced the frequency but Intel downright fixed it.
  • id_aaa - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link

    I'm not buying a controlled, I'm buying an SSD, and they delivered a crappy SSD, why should I trust OCZ now?
  • semo - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    Yep, OCZ are smiley and I won't buy a product from them as long as there are competitive alternatives. They still haven't issued a mass recall of their first 25nm drives which did not have as much capacity as per their specs. OCZ blamed it on Sandforce's RAISE technology and waited for customers to contact them before replacing the affected SSDs. No one knows how many of those duds were sold and how many were replaced.
  • kristof007 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    I've been using my Vertex 2 for just over 2 years now. 120GB model. Not a single hiccup. I'd call that fairly reliable.
  • PaulSabey - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link

    My 120gb Vertex 2 (bought March 2011) had been running without a hiccup for nearly two years. Then yesterday it just spontaneously failed (BIOS could not even see the drive as present). I guess you can think your drive is totally reliable .. until the moment it fails.
  • Breach1337 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    Same here.Vertex 3 owner - although a great product for months I had a unfit for purpose product, no support and no fix from OCZ and on top of that people were treated with utter condescending arrogance on the forums, asked to effectively troubleshoot the product and if you refused to do that you were not cooperating. Sorry, but never OCZ for me ever again.
  • pattycake0147 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I can live with the lower read speeds, but the power consumption is too high. That said if reliability holds up, sounds like I'll be getting a new drive this year.

    Great review Anand!
  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    If this was going in a laptop, MAYBE I would be concerned, but what's a few watts for some more tasty iops?
  • pattycake0147 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    A laptop is exactly what I would like to use it for. Both of my desktops already have SSD/HDD combos.
  • vol7ron - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Exactly, and it's where power consumption matters even more.

    I'd also like to see where the OWC drives fit in.
  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    There are plenty of lower pwer SSD's that have similiar tasty iops, so you won't be disappointed...the falvouring is a little different, but you will still enjoy it.
  • ckryan - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I very much expect the next generation of Marvell drives to look similar in some respects to the V4.

    I applaud OCZ for doing things differently, but they're probably just trying to beat the next wave of Marvell powered drives to market, not making up for SFs immediate deficiencies.
  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Do you think Marvell can release a drive with as many delicious iops?
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Not Marvell, because they only make controllers ;-)

    Plextor M3 Pro is already providing up to 75K/69K IOPS (read/write). Marvell released a new controller a couple of weeks ago and at least according to the press release, random speeds should be substantially improved with a great firmware. How fast is still a question but I wouldn't be surprised to see figures similar to Indilinx 2.

    And as a side note, Plextor M3 review should be up later today or tomorrow as well :-)
  • ckryan - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    The M3P is fantastic. It's like the V4 without the compromise. Plus, I'd take better low QD performance any day of the week over high QD performance. The M3P is a lot more balanced.

    Plus, yeah, the 830 is awesome too, but it doesn't really cater to the super high 4Krw crowd. I feel like OCZ just needed to get this drive out before then next wave of similar drives hit, and will later tweak the FW to better accommodate desktop workloads.

    But it does accomplish one thing -- whatever FW/FTL they strapped on that drive doesn't look like anything else at the moment. It's certainly easy to see in an ocean of charts.

    I think OCZ just mainly wanted to reverse their years of SF marketing practice with the V4 -- Latency is now important. Compressible data is out. They just had to wait until they had a product that could match the paper specs of the 2281. Ironically, I'd take it over a V3 any day of the week, but the 2281 is still better with most workloads.
  • etamin - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Perhaps the V4 may turn out to be a more economical choice though because it is entirely developed in house.
  • jwilliams4200 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    LOL. Except for the rebadged Marvell controller and the flash memory, yeah, entirely in house.
  • rw1986 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link

    rebadged MRVL controller?? can u elaborate
  • jwilliams4200 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link

    Did you ever wonder why Indilinx took so long to come out with a 2nd gen controller after their first was so popular?

    Well, they didn't. Not really. OCZ does not want you to know that they have a relationship with Marvell, and their new controller is basically a Marvell 88SS9187. It would be hard to justify the shareholder money OCZ spent on acquiring Indilinx if the truth were known.

    If you have any doubts, look at the press release from Marvell press release bullet points and compare them to the features OCZ is touting in the Vertex 4. They are identical.

    http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do...
  • rw1986 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link

    This seems very speculative. OCZ has admitted collaboration with Marvell (for example on their new Kilimanjaro platform for the Z-Drive R5 PCIe SSD).

    here is the link to the OCZ Everest 2 announcement: http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2012/4...

    In the announcement, OCZ makes some specific claims surrounding Everest 2 -- for example:

    "the Everest 2 SSD controller reduces latency to 0.043ms for read operations and 0.026ms for write operations, yielding an improvement of approximately 80 percent over the previous Everest SSD controller generation"

    "The advanced, multi-level BCH ECC engine with progressive error correction adapts to the specific error characteristics of different NAND devices. The programmable ECC engine achieves an effective correction power of up to 128 bits per 1KB of data while significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER)."

    The Marvell sheet emphasizes some similar things (high performance, error correction technology) but these are more general claims than what OCZ has listed in their Everest 2 spec sheet.

    Is the foundation of your assumption that Everest 2 is just the 88SS9187 that the spec sheets sound similar? That does not seem conclusive to put it generously
  • jwilliams4200 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    There is no hard evidence that is publicly available since OCZ is keeping it quiet for obvious reasons.

    The Octane uses a rebadged Marvell 88SS9174, and the Vertex 4 uses a rebadged Marvell 88SS9187.
  • rw1986 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    I'm just curious how you can make these claims so authoritatively when, as you say "there is no hard evidence that is publicly available" to support your position.

    What you seem to be suggesting is that OCZ made a 32 million dollar acquisition in April of 2011 (Indilinx) and then decided to simply license and rebadge controllers from Marvell rather than build internally (which is completely contrary to what OCZ has told investors and the public). On a Thursday conference call OCZ's CEO was quite adamant that Everest 2 is completely their IP and will improve their profit margin strucutre as a result (since they don't have to pay a fee to Sandforce for each controller as before). If what you are saying is true then OCZ has misled their investors at best.

    This is a pretty serious accusation you are making here and it would be nice if you had a little more to say in support of it than "trust me, i know." If you were really in a position to know then I doubt you would be posting on the comments section at AT.

    I'd be interested to hear some experts weigh in on this exchange. How could we verify or disprove that the Everest 2 is really not Indilinx but instead a rebadged 9187? Surely some analysis can be done on the ASIC
  • jwilliams4200 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link

    It isn't very important to me either way, since I have no financial interest. But OCZ has a history of dishonesty, and it bothers me to see them get away it.

    If it is important to you, you could start by contacting the appropriate people at OCZ and asking whether the controllers in the Octane and the Vertex 4 have similar or identical circuits with Marvell controllers.
  • jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - link

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/5741/ocz-confirms-oc...
  • hackztor - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link

    Good job on being correct. I think alot of people feel betrayed again by ocz. Last time i will purchase their product no matter what.
  • pookguy88 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    so wait, right now they'll (256gb, 512gb) ship with 1gb DRAM but later on 512mb? Is it just me or is that going to be a huge deal for customers once they realize that they basically got jacked 512mb of RAM vs early adopters?
  • pattycake0147 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I inferred that the smaller drives will ship with 1GB but only 512MB will be used on the drive.
  • Voo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Considering that was explicitly stated in the article there's not much to infer here is it?

    "Oh no I was jacked from 512mb that were deactivated anyhow - what a scandal!"
  • antef - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Why is your standard recommendation still the Samsung SSD 830? Given the performance, prices, and most notably, the incredibly excellent reviews on sites like Newegg, the Crucial M4 would still be my recommendation to new shoppers.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Samsung 830 is "a lot" faster, see our Heavy and Light benches. In real world, you will probably not notice the difference unless you do something I/O intensive. Personally, I've been recommending both Crucial m4 and Samsung 830. Crucial is great if you want to save a few bucks but otherwise Samsung is better. I think Anand has been using the Samsung in his main system for months now and haven't had issues, so that may be a reason as well. After all, we speak based on our own experience.
  • kristof007 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    I've been looking around for articles and just looked at bench marks (ignore the M3 and Vertex 4 reviews) and it seemed like the Crucial m4 was hands down the best drive. I purchased it yesterday via Newegg for $299 (it was on sale). Sounds like I won't be disappointed.

    I was wondering if you guys could maybe have like a top 3 list for SSDs (or heck .. for all categories) with quick pro's and con's for what is out at the moment and what is the best one performance wise.

    By the way, I haven't been reading much AT lately, but I've seen a few of your articles and would like to thank you for your work!
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    The 830 offers up nearly the best "real world" disk busy performance in both the light and heavy benchmarks and has proven to be extremely reliable and consistent without being very expensive. The M4 is great... but a bit outdated performance-wise (not as fast as the 830).
  • antef - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Thanks for the replies. I guess I saw them as trading places a good bit in the benchmarks, but I do see that the 830 often comes out on top. I guess I figured the performance difference is practically nil for mainstream uses and the M4 seems more highly reviewed. But the 830 has been out for less time, so that may improve over time.
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    That's just it - the differences in overall performance aren't likely to keep one awake at night. In the case of a person that has never used an SSD, just about any SSD available online today will completely shock and awe.

    An SSD that is 20% faster than another SSD which are both 900% faster than a 5400RPM HDD... not a big deal.
  • antef - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    "Shock and awe" is the correct way to describe my feelings the first time I saw Windows boot in 3 seconds. :)
  • beginner99 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Price wise for average user the m4 is the best bang for the buck. Here its the cheapest sata-3 128 GB drive and 20$ cheaper than the Samsung. Also m4 uses less power, eg better for a laptop.
  • ExarKun333 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Looks like a trade-off that gave-up read performance for write performance with poor power consumption. Based on the charts, the HyperX 240GB or the Intel 520 would be better all-around options. The OCZ name also doesn't inspire a lot of confidence when it comes to reliability or support. They will really need up their game for customer service this generation to build some confidence in them.
  • alan1476 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    If you are not impressed by this drive the review did not do this drive justice. If someone reviews a drive especially an SSD you have to understand the inner workings and just how it applys itself to applications in the real world. This SSD is ground breaking.
  • cknobman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I see no Sandforce 512gb drives shown in the performance charts.

    Its pretty common knowledge that SSD performance goes up with capacity and showcasing the Vertex 4 512gb drive against either smaller SSD's or older controllers makes it look better than it likely is.

    Did anyone notice the abysmal speeds for the 120gb model???
    I also noticed pretty high power consumption.

    I don't consider this review proper until you place a 2nd Gen 512gb SandForce drive in the charts to compare directly against the 512gb Vertex 4 drive.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    240GB Vertex 3 is actually faster than 480GB Vertex 3:

    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/352?vs=561
    http://www.ocztechnology.com/res/manuals/OCZ_Verte...
  • MarkLuvsCS - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    256gb and 512gb should perform nearly identical because they have the same number of NAND packages - 16. the 512gb version just uses 32gb vs 16gb NAND in the 256gb version. The differences between the 256 and 512 gb drives are negligible.
  • Iketh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    that concept of yours depends entirely on how each line of SSD is architected... it goes without saying that each manufacturer implements different architectures....

    your comment is what is misleading
  • Glock24 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    "...a single TRIM pass is able to restore performance to new"

    I've seen statements similar to this on previous reviews, but how do you force a TRIM pass? Do you use a third party application? Is there a console command?
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Just format the drive using Windows' Disk Management :-)
  • Glock24 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Well, I will ask this another way:

    Is there a way to force the TRIM command that wil nor destroy the data in the drive?
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    If you've had TRIM enabled throughout the life of the drive, then there is no need to TRIM it as the empty space should already be TRIM'ed.

    One way of forcing it would be to multiply a big file (e.g. an archive or movie file) until the drive runs out of space. Then delete the multiples.
  • PartEleven - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I was also curious about this, and hope you can clarify some more. So my understanding is that Windows 7 has TRIM enabled by default if you have an SSD right? So are you saying that if you have TRIM enable throughout the life of the drive, Windows should automagically TRIM the empty space regularly?
  • adamantinepiggy - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    http://ssd.windows98.co.uk/downloads/ssdtool.exe

    This tool will initiate a trim manually. Problem is that unless you can monitor the SSD, you won't know it has actually done anything. I know it works with Crucial Drives on Win7 as I can see the SSD's initiate a trim from the monitoring port of the SSD when I use this app. I can only "assume" it works on other SSD's too but since I can't monitor them, I can't know for sure.
  • Glock24 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I'll try that tool.

    For those using Linux, I've used a tool bundled with hdparm calles wiper.sh:

    wiper.sh: Linux SATA SSD TRIM utility, version 3.4, by Mark Lord.

    Linux tune-up (TRIM) utility for SATA SSDs
    Usage: /usr/sbin/wiper.sh [--max-ranges <num>] [--verbose] [--commit] <mount_point|block_device>
    Eg: /usr/sbin/wiper.sh /dev/sda1
  • elghosto - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    linux
    #fstrim
  • Per Hansson - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    "monitoring port of the SSD"
    Please enlighten me, Google was no help...
    Is it a hardware interface that allows you to see how the drive operates?
  • adamantinepiggy - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    Basically, every SSD has some sort of real-time data port that allows engineers to monitor what is going on with the SSD, even when the drive hangs or has other issues. It is used mainly for development/testing. Consider it sorta like a way to read/access the dump file when Windows BSOD's, except in this case it's on the SSD. This monitoring port gets disabled on released drive firmware and the hardware attachment leads are unattached..
  • jonup - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Thanks for asking this! I always wanted to know that myself. I actually google it to no avail while I was reading the article.
  • medys - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    How long till we are overclocking our SSD processors :-/
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Umm. How you gonna fit that water cooler inside the case?
  • Iketh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    hahaha... NEVER!! I've yet to break a Win7 installation from overclocking, but I broke XP many times... I shudder at the thought of overclocking an SSD :)
  • Iketh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Although, I wonder how long until the processors in SSDs reach, say, today's single-core Atom... OR better yet, how long before the SSD controller is built into the CPU much like the memory controller, where we install more storage the same way we install ram... and then later again the nand controller and RAM controller merge, and a computer is nothing more than a SoC with some nand sitting next to it...
  • iwod - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    We finally have controller that are able to bump out MB faster then Sandforce without using some silly compression engine. Marvell also announced next Gen SSD controller as well.

    Again we have reached the limit of SATA 6Gbps, we will need to start thinking about SATA Express, Lower power consumption, reliability. etc...
  • akbo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Though I think the high consumption might be because of the controller, the chip is huge! With thermy sticky!

    Wonder when a die shrink of this is possible.
  • Freddy G. - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I want an SSD now for my gaming system, as boot and games drive, what u guys think should be better? Crucial m4 or Corsair Force GT? BTW Im going to start with a 120gb version in the meantime.
  • kyuu - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Whichever is cheaper. Performance-wise, you won't notice a difference. I promise.
  • tynopik - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    don't think you said what you meant
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I think you're quite right :) Fixed.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I have two M4's, I find the iops to be as delicious as milk shakes.
  • gloinsir - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    What's up with the huge variance in performance between the Samsung 830 512MB and 256MB drives? On the light workload test - http://www.anandtech.com/show/5719/ocz-vertex-4-re... - The 256MB version is 25-50% faster on all tests. That's an enormous difference.
    Is there a firmware difference between the two drives?

    Thanks for a great review. I hope the firmware updates and reliability work out. Competition is good!
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    There is indeed a firmware difference between the drives - unfortunately Samsung's latest firmware won't install on the 512GB drive for whatever reason, so it's left with lower performance.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • ckryan - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Are you sure that's a FW difference? I didn't really notice much of a difference overall between my 256GB and 512GB 830s, but there are differences.

    My 512 on 01FW pulls down substantially higher QD1 4K RWs than the 256 on 01 or 03FW, but there are other differences. I think there are slightly different characteristics between the 32gbit and 64gbit dies.
  • ViviTheMage - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Seriously, these are probably the most nutritious, and scrumdidaliumpcious iop looking SSD's I have seen.
  • edlee321 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Im another one of those crucial m4 fans, you cannot get better bang for the buck than these drives, especially for power consumption and reliability.

    The difference between 4k read from one ssd to another is not important, reliability and idle power consumption is whats important.

    If anand can run a one month stress test using random uncompressable data on all the current drives in his possession that would be great. I want to see what drive lasts out the longest.
  • RussianSensation - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    It seems after extensive use and degradation, the Corsair Performance Pro is one of the best, even besting the Crucial M4:

    http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/m...
  • meloz - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    What's the deal with using such an enormous SoC built on 65nm process?

    I can understand OCZ / Indilinx not willing to shell premium for cutting edge 28nm process, but they could have at least used 45nm process.

    With a 45nm process the SoC would be a lot smaller, thermal management would be easier (and cheaper), and power consumption would be lower (firmware update or not).

    The cost of more modern process is easily balanced by the fact that they would get a lot more chips of a 300nm wafer with 45nm rather than 65nm.

    Vertex 4 is a good improvement from OCZ, but they need to get serious about their execution and 'little details' if they still want to exist in another 5 years. Marvell, SandForce and Intel are not standing still and as competition increases the price of such poor decisions will weigh heavily against OCZ.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    While we obviously can't speak for OCZ, when it comes to processes do keep in mind that costs escalate with the process. Older processes are not only cheaper because they have effectively reached their maximum yields, but the cost of their development has always been paid off, allowing the fabs to sell wafer runs at a lower cost and still book a profit.

    For a sufficiently simple device, the additional number of dice per wafer may not offset the higher per-wafer costs, lower yield, and demand-driven pricing. 4x nm processes are still booked solid, and will be for some time.
  • NCM - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Firmware "promises" aren't worth the guarantee they're not written on.
    We buy today's product, not the product there might be in some indefinite future.
  • rw1986 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    seems intel NAND would cost more and OCZ buys most of their NAND from Micron I believe
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Without knowing the prices, it's hard to say anything. Intel and Micron NAND come from the same fab so the silicon quality is the same. Intel does rate their NAND higher (5000 vs 3000 P/E cycles) and both companies have their own validation processes, so it's possible that Intel NAND is slightly higher quality.

    It's possible that OCZ sources NAND from several fabs for the Vertex 4. E.g. Vertex 3 used NAND from Intel, Micron, Spectec and Hynix. Micron NAND is available in higher quantity as they own more plants, so that's why it's more common. Price wise I guess they are all about the same, though.
  • bji - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Any time a drive has a significant amount of RAM in it, I get a bit worried about the possibility of data loss on power outage. If the drive has the name OCZ attached, this worry becomes a huge concern. I would not be at all surprised if OCZ increased performance in part by reducing durability in the face of power outage.

    If the RAM is used as a write buffer, then on power outage the data is lost. This is not a problem if the drive correctly reports this state to the operating system - i.e., not telling the operating system that the data is sync'd to permanent storage until it's been written out of RAM cache into the flash cells. But if the drive cheats by telling the operating system that the blocks have been written when they have been stored in its RAM rather than when the blocks have actually made it to the flash cells, then data can be lost despite the guarantee that the drive has given that it can't.

    Cheating in this way could make write performance look better, and given that the drive looks particularly good for write performance and has a lot of RAM on board, I am very, very suspicious.

    What about testing this drive's durability in the face of power loss?
  • geddarkstorm - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    That's a good question.

    However, from the article it sounds like the RAM is mostly being used to prefetch reads, rather than buffer writes.
  • bji - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    That's Anandtech's conjecture. Even if OCZ told them it was so, it's not proven, as OCZ could be lying to cover the deficiency.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Exactly!! An "Enterprise SSD" with no superCap?? That needs some 'splainin.
  • hechacker1 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I'm not really sure if they are buffering that much data. I'm betting a lot of it is to cache the state of the available flash (tables and bitmaps), and to provide lots of room so you can use memory intensive algorithms to allocate, sort, and combine data before it gets place on the flash.

    Even with some cache, just because the SSD is so fast, it's going to empty it in 1 second.
  • vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link

    As long as it's not too much RAM to write out before the energy in the caps runs out, it's not really a problem.
  • 7Enigma - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    But you can show all these pretty specs and graphs but until you fix something like this catastrophe I will avoid your SSD's like the plague:

    Oh and what controller is in this beauty......Indilinx Everest!

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=PSa...
  • Comdrpopnfresh - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    It's nice to see the AES-256 encryption on it. That'll come in handy when the drive dies and has to be sent back to OCZ.
    I have 2 vertex2's and a vertex3, all of which died, and I have yet to eat or rma- OCZ provides no way to fulfill the warranty without compromising the security of user data. Used to be a big fan of OCZ, and loved their ssds... until this situation arose THREE TIMES.
  • vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link

    Sure they do -- encrypt it yourself in software. Anyway, why would you trust OCZ not to be able to decrypt data encrypted by closed-source firmware designed by OCZ?
  • Hurk - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    where is the data for the 128gb version? it will be significantly different from the 256/512, and since im really loving SSD caching on new system builds, the smaller drive is more important to see the numbers for than the 256/512 for me.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Manufacturers often send bigger capacities for reviews (they are the highest performing ones, after all). I'm sure there will be a 128GB review once we get one, which is hopefully sooner than later :-)
  • Reikon - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    Nice referral link there.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    No worries -- they've been marked as spam and are gone now. Let this serve as a warning to others: if you try to put in a referral link in a comment and we mark you as spam, all your comments go bye bye!
  • iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    sorry about that. c an you delete my last entry below. didn't see any TOS against referral links.
  • Coup27 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link

    For the uneducated, what is a referral link?
  • ginman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I have been reading articles here for some number of years now and i like reading these. But i notice it's normally the same players, Intel, OCZ, Samsung, Crucial ect... I was wondering if there has been any benches run on the Mushkin SSD's, pricewise; they seem to be setting a new trend.
  • InsaneScientist - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    What's up with the connector on the opposite end of the board from the SATA connector? It looks like the same pinout as SATA, but smaller.
    Did I miss an interface specification?

    And, more importantly: what's it for? 2 interfaces on one drive?
  • pc_void - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    More like for sale ON amazon.

    Amazon itself isn't selling it atm.

    And the prices are stupid.
  • sfroom - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I just reread the Samsung 830 review based on your comment in the last paragraph, but could barely find any mention of Mac use in the review. Why is the Samsung 830 your SSD of choice for Mac users?

    Additionally, I'd LOVE to see an article comparing the current batch of SSD's on the mac platform. Thanks!
  • ectoplasmosis - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    I second this.
  • ckryan - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link

    The 830 pretty much works trouble free in OSX, with or without TRIM. It's garbage collection on post-CXM01B1Q FW is good, and performance got a bump with it too.
  • Samplex - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    Why is this: "If you're buying an SSD today, our standarding recommendation (particularly for Mac users) is Samsung's SSD 830."

    Why is the Samsung better for mac users?
  • 7Enigma - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    See here:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd...

    But as ckryan said above it comes down to garbage collection and TRIM support (or lackthereof).
  • iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    You can purchase the drive at amazon now - http://goo.gl/p8BSK
  • iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    also listed at newegg for $179.99
  • iceman98343 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    please delete the above comment.
  • DukeN - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link

    Until this has been out a year, that's all this amounts to.

    I'd rather pay for Intel/Crucial reliability than be OCZ's unpaid beta tester.
  • ceast3 - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link

    The previous poster was correct, OCZ fixed the BSOD problem, not intel. Sandforce then released their fix to the other Manufacturers. Sandforce was the problem.... fact. So far all feedback is great with the Vertex 4, if that continues until Ivy Bridge and nothing better comes out, I'll be getting one! Vertex 3 and all other SF-2000 based SSD's showed problems right away, so I'm not worried.
  • alfatekpt - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link

    Why is your recommendation the Samsung's SSD 830 instead of OCZ vertex 3?

    Reliability?
  • Snigel - Sunday, April 22, 2012 - link

    It's interesting to see the max values of power consumption, but it would also be interesting to factor in the speed of the drives.

    Usually a desktop user have a fixed amount of data that the disk needs to transfer, so continous load wattage is not that interesting compared to how much energy that is required to get the job done.

    wattage * transfer time

    For continous loads it would be more interesting to see something like
    transfer speed / wattage

    How much performance do I get compared to the energy I put in?

    I could do these calculations manually of course, but I don't know how the write tests in the power consumption part are performed, so I cannot get the speed data from other charts.
  • vegemeister - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link

    An SSD will be idle nearly all the time in nearly all desktop and laptop use cases. When the idle power consumption is > 1W, it doesn't much matter what the load power consumption is.
  • Winning29 - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link

    Hey guys. Check out my OCZ Vertex 4 speed test on YouTube. It shows my home PC's boot up time, then I load a VDI environment running on Citrix XenApp and VMware Workstation.

    http://youtu.be/YrnIcudM7zo

    I'd welcome any comments, feedback or questions.
  • Bluemars_ - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - link

    New firmware 1.4's out, does it fix the low queue depth sequential read performance?
  • twindragon6 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link

    From OCZ's website.

    "CURRENT FIRMWARE RELEASE is v1.4.1.3"

    I'm curious to see how this drive performs now with the newer firmware.
  • gigahertz20 - Friday, June 29, 2012 - link

    Yes, I would like to see if the newer firmware has fixed this as well as OCZ promised. I wish they would create an update for this review.
  • yj100 - Monday, July 9, 2012 - link

    I got a Vertex 4 512gb a week ago for my MacBook Pro and after 2 days it crashed. Only a gray screen with a spinning wheel would come up when trying to boot.

    Apparently this is common as OCZ have a forum thread dedicated to this. Apparently they have a firmware fix but it didn't help me.

    I have a 256gb Vertex 4 for about a couple of months with no problems. For 512gb I'm going to stay away from the Vertex 4.
  • Zarathustra[h] - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link

    As some other sites have tested, it seems like the Vertex 4 is a completely different drive with the newer 1.4 firmware, and 1.5 added even more performance.

    Has Anandtech considered revisiting this drive with a later firmware? I have much more faith in Anandtechs reviews on SSD's than others and would love to see this drive tested with the latest firmware.
  • Zoeff - Sunday, July 29, 2012 - link

    I second this.

    The heavy/light storage bench is unique to Anandtech and feels much more representative of actual usage.
  • Salv0 - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link

    +1
    Retest with the latest fw will be great!
  • teefatt - Monday, September 3, 2012 - link

    To potential OCZ SSD buyers,

    I posted the above matters to OCZ forum and got no solution from them after many email in and out in a week time. They want me to write an email to HP for help. They even deleted my reply and make the post like I did not reply their request or reply their mail. Furthermore, they blocked my post. They wanted me to send them a personal email instead of on the public forum.

    They moved my post to ForumOCZ Support ForumCompliments, Complaints, & SuggestionsVertex 4 512GB BSOD in RAID 0 setup.
    or

    http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...

    That's why I totally agree with the post here on the first page:

    "It's still a drive from OCZ, a company that has repeatedly and blatantly used its customer base as unpaid beta testers, and lambasted them when they dared to complain about it. No thank you. The fastest drive in the world is of no use to me if it's causing my computer to BSOD constantly. I'll be spending my money and that of my many clients on drives with proven track records for reliability and excellent customer service, both sadly lacking in OCZ products."

    I will walk away from this OCZ unreliable SSD. Luckily I am able to return the drives and asked for refund instead of following their steps to do the beta tester in a week time.

    Think twice before you buy it.

    Thanks you.
  • vwrafi - Saturday, September 29, 2012 - link

    Hi. When the drive goes into the GC mode ( standard mode ), does it mean that the drive will start to read and write its internal data ? If so, does it mean that the write lifetime of the cells will reduce ( write lifetime of the disk will be reduced every time it reorganize itself ) ? And if so, can we switch off this or install firmware that do not shorten the write lifetime of the disk ?

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